Recently you might have noticed that not only were you getting email notifications from us informing you of increased sharing, following or engagement on your site, but now we’re giving you suggestions on what to do in order to capitalize on these spikes. We call them actionable insights. You can call them your new best friend.

Why are actionable insights important? Well, if you’re like us, you’re glued to your computer all day long, watching your analytics and trying new things to continually improve your traffic and engagement. BUT if you’re not like us, and most people aren’t, you might only check your analytics when a campaign is running or you’ve activated a new tool.

With actionable insights, WE tell YOU when something is going on on your site in real time. This means that even if you didn’t know that your recent article about brown bears hibernating in peoples sheds is being shared around the globe WE DO! And we’ll tell you! So you can post that baby all over your Facebook and Twitter and make it the lead story on your site.

It not only notifies you of the spike, but right in the email we suggest ways you can use the tools to take action and promote the article even more. It’s really a simple and efficient way to capitalize on the hard work you’re already doing.

So be on the look out for your actionable email alerts and let us know if there are other ways we can help you use the tools to make your site even more powerful! Haven’t started using our tools yet? What are you waiting for – get started now!

You asked and we listened. After we recently launched the ability to create Custom Messages in our Marketing Tools, we got some awesome feedback – including some great success stories (think increasing email subscriptions by 10x) and some “This is changing the way I do marketing” quotes. But we also got some suggestions, and one that we heard loud and clear was the ability to add an image to the Marketing Overlay tool. So as of last week, you can now choose from the set we’ve created or add your own hosted image.

We’re also continuing to make more changes to the Marketing Tools and look forward to hearing from you, our users, who know best how we can get even better. Let us know below what else you’d like to see on the Marketing Overlay or Welcome Bar.

]]>https://www.addthis.com/blog/2015/01/28/new-introducing-image-overlay-options-for-our-marketing-overlay/feed/8Customize Your Share Layer in Time for Halloweenhttps://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/10/15/7199/
https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/10/15/7199/#commentsTue, 15 Oct 2013 12:30:44 +0000http://www.addthis.com/blog/?p=7199One of the great things about Smart Layers is that there are lots of options that’ll let your site’s personality shine through. These examples of additional configurations will allow you to change things like the position of the buttons, which services show up, and even the hover color. Here are some of the styling options for the Share Layer that I frequently see publishers asking about, accompanied with ghouly examples. :)

Show Me The Services!

By default, the services that are displayed within the Share Layer are different for each individual user that visits your site. This is based on the user’s past sharing history, and the services that are most popular. Rather than having the default Preferred Services you can modify your Smart Layers code to choose which services will always appear for your visitors.

But, I Want Them Over There!

Smart Layers also allows you to specify whether you want the share buttons to appear at a fixed position on either the left or right side of your website. To change the position, you would modify your Smart Layers code to look like this:

addthis.layers({
'share' : {
'position' : 'left'
}
});

Although this change made the buttons appear on the left, suppose your Halloween-themed site with a banner that spans across the top. It would be better if you could also move the position down just a bit. That’s why the ‘offset’ option was added. With ‘offset’ you can specify the relative position from the top or bottom of the browser window. Here’s an example of how to add it to your code:

Turning Into a Pumpkin

Once you have the share buttons in the right spot, you might think to yourself that the hover color would look cooler if it were pumpkin-orange to match your jack o’lanterns rather than the default blue.

To change the color, all you need to do is apply some CSS. Here’s the class selector that’s needed to make that change:

.at-vertical-menu a:hover{
background-color: #FF9100;
}

The Smart Layers API provides many other configuration options for the share buttons. For example, you can choose whether you want the Layer to appear only on desktops or mobile devices. You can also change the theme, or change the text displayed after sharing a page. If you have any suggestions for additional options that should be included in a future release, we’d be interested in hearing about them!

]]>https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/10/15/7199/feed/12Smart Layers Plugin Now Available for WordPress, Blogger, and Joomlahttps://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/10/11/smart-layers-plugin-now-available-for-wordpress-blogger-and-joomla/
https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/10/11/smart-layers-plugin-now-available-for-wordpress-blogger-and-joomla/#commentsFri, 11 Oct 2013 12:30:32 +0000http://www.addthis.com/blog/?p=7241We’ve been listening to your feedback about how to improve Smart Layers since it launched this summer. At the top of the list of requests from our users was an easier way to install Smart Layers on their Blogger/Joomla/Wordpress sites. And we heard you. I am happy to say we are now providing Smart Layers as a plugin for Blogger, WordPress, and Joomla.

WordPress Plugin

If you’re using a self-hosted WordPress site––that is, from WordPress.org––we’ve got the plugin ready for you. (Unfortunately, you can’t add the Smart Layers plugin to a WordPress.com site.) To get started, you can either go to our Smart Layers plugin page and download the plugin to install it manually, or you can install the plugin from the WordPress Plugins Admin screen. To do that, search for “Smart Layers” or “AddThis” and it should come up in the results, as shown in the following image.

Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, you can customize your layers through our beautiful configuration tool. (Hat tip to Greg Franko and Jeff Wong for doing an amazing job with the UX, UI, and implementation!)

Blogger Widget

To get the Blogger Widget, start by customizing your code, and clicking that “Install Blogger Widget” button when you’re done. It’ll take you to your Blogger login screen (if you’re not already logged in), and you’ll see that we pass the code through to Blogger so you can install it right on your site without copying/pasting the code. (Sorry, IE users, you’ll have to copy/paste the code into your Blogger site.)

Joomla Module

Add Smart Layers to your Joomla site by downloading the Smart Layers Module, and log in to your Joomla Admin panel to install it. Once installed, just select the layers you want, specify your service information, and enable!

Other Smart Layers Updates

We also released some other new Smart Layers features we thought you’d be interested in:

A responsive design that collapses our Share and Follow Layers automatically into a mobile dock (check it out by slowly shrinking your browser window, and you’ll see the tools magically transform!)

The ability to set an offset for the Share, Follow and What’s Next Layers in case our default positioning overlaps something on your site; our Smart Layers API shows you how to do this

The ability to only show Smart Layers on mobile browsers. Though your users would be happier if Smart Layers was on both desktop and mobile browsers, if you really want, you can customize them to only show up on mobile browser (also in the API)

What’s Next?

I’ll end this amazing list of new features by saying that we’re currently working on updating one of our existing tools to include a bunch of cool Smart Layers features. I won’t say what those features are just yet, but stay tuned—you’ll be seeing more cool stuff shortly!

We’re still gathering feedback. So if you’re on Twitter, hit me up at @SolChea, and let me know what other ideas you have to help make our tools and services better for you! You can also comment below. We’re listening. :)

]]>https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/10/11/smart-layers-plugin-now-available-for-wordpress-blogger-and-joomla/feed/37[UPDATE: Bottom Positioning Now Available!] Wibiya Users, We Have Great Solutions for You!https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/10/10/wibiya-users-we-have-great-solutions-for-you/
https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/10/10/wibiya-users-we-have-great-solutions-for-you/#commentsThu, 10 Oct 2013 13:02:12 +0000http://www.addthis.com/blog/?p=7267We heard the news, Wibiya Users, and transitioning to a new tool might be challenging but we are here to help! AddThis offers an easy-to-implement solution so don’t miss a beat when it comes to engaging with your customers and visitors. You have a site to run, and we want to help make this change the least of your worries.

The AddThis Welcome Bar is also free, and will give your site a compelling engagement opportunity for your visitors with these features:

Display a custom message for your visitors to share, follow, or go to a specific page

Change the colors to match your site

Pick when and how the Welcome Bar will appear

Target audiences with specific messages based on where they came from

Empower your content strategy with our top-notch analytics dashboard

One piece of easy-to-install code that’s FREE

Bottom-page positioning (see instructions below)

How to Position the Bar at the Bottom

To place your Welcome Bar at the bottom of your page, all you need to do is add "position": "bottom", right underneath the addthis.bar.initialize({ code. It’ll look something like this:

The Welcome Bar isn’t the only thing we have to offer. You can also strengthen content engagement on your site with our full suite of tools called Smart Layers. From Sharing and Following, to Recommended Content and the AddThis Welcome Bar, Smart Layers tools are powered by the massive AddThis data pool which helps you create more personalized experiences for your users.

AddThis tools can be seen on over 14 million domains and 1.3 billion users across the world. We’d love for you to join our growing and passionate community of users. We’re here to help you implement a smooth transition before the end of this year. Please reach out to us for any questions you may have. Feel free to comment below, or send us an email. You can find us on Facebook and Twitter, too.

Update 10.22.13: Bottom positioning now available. New code added to the blog post.

]]>https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/10/10/wibiya-users-we-have-great-solutions-for-you/feed/12Site Spotlight: The Offbeat Bride Marries Smart Layershttps://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/08/21/site-spotlight-the-offbeat-bride/
https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/08/21/site-spotlight-the-offbeat-bride/#commentsWed, 21 Aug 2013 14:44:58 +0000http://www.addthis.com/blog/?p=6782A couple weeks ago, I came across an awesome post by Ariel Meadow Stallings about Smart Layers. She won me over with her sweet graphic skills:

She was pretty stoked to see what Smart Layers was doing on her site. We chatted a bit, and talked to her community, gathering their feedback on the new tool. It was a great experience from our end, but what was even more exciting, was Ariel’s other graphic:

This is the kind of result we wanted our publishers to have with the new Smart Layers. For a community as engaged as Ariel’s Offbeat Empire (seriously, you should check them out and read her story on how it began), there are lessons we can all learn. Here are three I gathered from our email interview.

1. Your Content Needs to Be Relevant to Every Phase of Your Audience’s Life

When I asked Ariel if a highly engaged community was her goal when she started the community, she responded with a resounding “Yes!”

“The engagement was absolutely part of my strategy,” she said. “Offbeat Bride is the flagship, bringing in 700,000 unique visitors a month.”

When she noticed the transient patterns of her visitors––brides would stick around for a year or so, and drop off after their weddings––she expanded the site to include resources to keep her community engaged throughout the different phases of their lives, like family and home life.

“Now we’ve got content to help readers with everything from moving into a dorm room, to juggling grad school, to getting engaged, to considering family, to starting a family (or not), to raising kids (or just being an awesome auntie/uncle if you’re child-free),” Ariel said.

That’s how the community became an empire.

2. Let Your Analytics Drive the Content You Create

One interesting things I learned from Ariel is how she gauges what content to produce based off of her Pinterest analytics.

“I watch my Pinterest source pages all day to get a feel for what content my readers are sharing,” she said. “We’ve got seven years of Offbeat Bride posts, and while aesthetic trends come and go, the core issues involved with wedding planning remain pretty consistent.”

Recycling old posts is one of Ariel’s favorite things to do––and it’s welcomed by her community.

“Often, I’ll share these older posts on our Facebook pages, which amplifies the sharing of content that was produced years ago,” she said. “I like to be transparent about why I’m sharing old posts. I’ll often say things like, ‘Based on number of pins, this bride’s hair basically wins the Internet’.”

“I love seeing old posts get new life via Pinterest,” she said.

(Take note: the fact that this strategy helped Ariel generate engaging content that helped her community grow for over seven years is a testament it works!)

3. Always Be Honest with Your Community

Speaking of transparency, Ariel makes sure to be open and honest with her community about her content, and the tools she has on her site. She’s been using AddThis tools since 2010, so when she added Smart Layers earlier this month, she wrote a blog post about the change, and explained to her community the reasons for adding it. Her reasons were simple: to increase pageviews. Some of her readers accepted the change, while others disagreed.

“Whenever I make a change on my blogs, I always make a point to be honest about why I’m making the change (in this case, increased pageviews were my goal), and then make sure readers know I’m really hearing their feedback,” Ariel said.

Smart Layers Does the Job

In the end, Ariel is happy with the results.

“The impact on my site’s recirculated clicks was immediately evident,” she said. “Before SmartLayers, a peak day of clicks was about 800 (and that was a rare exception), after SmartLayers, I started getting up to 1,500 clicks a day.”

“I’ve seen a weekly pattern emerge, with clicks ramping up through the work-week, and then going into a lull over the weekend,” she said. “But now that weekend ‘lull’ is what used to be a standard weekday for me!”

I’ll leave you with this food-for-thought. Ariel says in her blog post: “As a publisher, I’m super stoked [about] Smart Layers because it’s great for getting folks to explore more posts on the blogs. As a reader, you can make your own choices!”

]]>https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/08/21/site-spotlight-the-offbeat-bride/feed/2How to Make Smart Layers Talk Your Talkhttps://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/08/15/make-smart-layers-talk-your-talk/
https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/08/15/make-smart-layers-talk-your-talk/#commentsThu, 15 Aug 2013 12:30:30 +0000http://www.addthis.com/blog/?p=6713Smart Layers is an extremely user-friendly tool. It’s designed to invite your visitors to share your content, show them cool content, and even try to convince them to stay in touch with you on your social networks. But to some of your visitors, Smart Layers may come across a little “stiff.” Just like your parents and grandparents, Smart Layers isn’t always up on the latest slang or teen vernacular. That’s why you can customize!

Depending on your audience, you may want to tell Smart Layers how to talk to your visitors. For example, Smart Layers will automatically tell your visitors:

Thanks for sharing!

That probably sounds OK to most of you, but if your site/blog is dedicated to connecting people who love medieval role-playing, it might be more appropriate to have Smart Layers tell your visitors this instead:

Thank ye good sir for spreading the word of our fine site!

So using the Smart Layers API, you can teach Smart Layers what to say to your visitors. To accomplish the above, you will modify your Smart Layers code to look like this:

With all those customizations, you can really make Smart Layers talk the way your audience does. So make Smart Layers one of the cool kids who not only walks the walk, but also talks the talk. Good luck, and if you need help, don’t hesitate to post questions in the comments below or visit our Support Portal.

]]>https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/08/15/make-smart-layers-talk-your-talk/feed/12Adding the Emergency Warning Smart Layerhttps://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/08/13/adding-the-emergency-warning-smart-layer/
https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/08/13/adding-the-emergency-warning-smart-layer/#commentsTue, 13 Aug 2013 16:01:03 +0000http://www.addthis.com/blog/?p=6738This morning, AddThis released the Emergency Warning Smart Layer project to our Labs pages. As we discussed in a previous post, this was a multi-partner collaboration that culminated in the successful completion of the code at our Hackathon last week.

Here’s an example of a local alert one would see on a page with Smart Layers that’s opted-in to receive AMBER alerts.

Though AddThis has had many Hackathons that have resulted in products being released, this project is the first to see a release so quickly. Kudos to the team for making it happen, while fitting in some late-night foosball as well!

How Does it Work?

ValueClick uses the Common Alerting Protocol to retrieve up to date alerts. This drives logic in their ad-serving technology to display alert messages instead of ads when the conditions warrant (i.e. the user is located in the geographical region of an active alert).

ValueClick has extended this tech to work as a gateway for partners like AddThis. They deliver both the alert parameters and pre-assembled graphical assets, and AddThis decides when to show these warnings to users when they are browsing publisher sites that have opted in.

Right now, we’re only implementing AMBER alerts, but as we move forward, we’ll look at adding severe weather alerts as well. We’ll also continue to improve the balance between immediacy of warnings, and how often we display them for a given user on a given website. We see around fifteen AMBER alerts per month and are tightly geo-targeted. So if you do the math, the display of these alerts will be a rare occurrence.

Since this is a Labs feature, we are releasing it as opt-in right now. Based on feedback and testing, we’ll see if it makes sense to move it to opt-out.

Design Considerations

In the weeks leading up to the hackathon, there was increasing press around mobile implementations of these warnings. Specifically, some late-night (or for some, early-morning) mobile phone alerts waking New Yorkers and Californians caused a bit of a stir. We didn’t want to add to that, so we spent a lot of time discussing user and publisher impact.

The first thing that we decided was that we’d never obscure publisher content to display a warning. So… no lightboxes allowed! We settled on an implementation that pushed the publisher content down slightly, displaying the warning in a slide-out from the top––similar to our Welcome Bar.

Next, we decided to cap the frequency of these warnings at one every four hours to reduce the total exposure to individual users. This is quite conservative, but we wanted to be careful while we were just starting out. In addition, if the user doesn’t have third-party cookies enabled, we won’t display the warning at all, since we can’t save a cross-site way to save state to frequency cap the warnings for them. (We do not use HTML5 LocalStorage as a rule.)

Third-Parties & the Open Web

The Emergency Warning Layer project encapsulates what third-party tools and services like AddThis do for publishers on the open web. By creating shared technology and experiences across websites and apps, users get more unified and ubiquitous functionality, and publishers get the power of networks focused on solving hard problems.

As a result, publishers can focus on making their product great, while third-parties take care of things like monetizing pageviews, driving traffic and engagement, and optimizing social channels. We believe that this forwards the spirit of the open web, letting anyone put their product or message out there, and potentially making a living from it.

This model also lets us create a potentially life-saving service together. Win, win, win.

What’s Next?

First of all, we want your feedback! As more of our publishers opt-in and get comfortable with the way we display the messaging, we would love to move it to an opt-out model. This would help fully use the AddThis publisher footprint to get warnings to the right people at the right time.

And the internal team, who won the popular Hackathon vote, produced the main Smart Layer product, landing page, backend integration, and some cool browser plugins to help us test: Sol Chea, Foo, Ben Knear, Jim Lane, Ted Pearson, Andy Tomasello, Yuesong Wang, and Emily Wilson.

]]>https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/08/13/adding-the-emergency-warning-smart-layer/feed/0Taking Control of What’s Next and Recommended Layers [UPDATED]https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/08/02/taking-control-of-whats-next-and-recommended-layers/
https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/08/02/taking-control-of-whats-next-and-recommended-layers/#commentsFri, 02 Aug 2013 15:41:34 +0000http://www.addthis.com/blog/?p=6659You’ve probably installed the What’s Next, and Recommended Layers on your site/blog, and you’re thinking to yourself, “Why is that blog post with kittens doing yoga showing up in the layers?!”

Well, the easy answer is because people love watching kittens doing yoga. The not-so-easy answer is that your visitors are constantly sharing and driving more visitors to that page, which signals that the page is trending and should be recommended to other visitors. Then again, you have lots of other great content that you want to appear in those layers as well. So I’m here to help you take control of your layers.

Built into Smart Layers is the ability to filter and take control (to a certain degree) of what links show up in the What’s Next and Recommended Layers. This is done through the linkFilter property which is documented in our API. The basic idea is that you define a function that will be passed the link and layer and you decide if you want it to show up.

Now let’s go through an example of how to filter out the fictional blog post about kittens doing yoga.

You should also notice that I added some console.log messages to output the URL, title, and layer. This is really useful to debug what’s going on under the hood. You should also see that at the end of the function, I’m returning the “link” object. By doing this, I’m telling Smart Layers that I want to show this link. If I don’t want Smart Layers to show this link, I would return “false” instead.

So now I’ll update my example and filter out any link that has “kitten” in its title:

I mentioned limitations earlier. To clarify, you cannot add a link or pick the link you want to have show up. You have the ability to filter out what you don’t want to display, but ultimately Smart Layers will choose what’s best for your visitor.

And there you have it! Now you can write your own custom rules to filter out specific links, or if you can come up with a regex, you could even filter out certain sections of your site/blog!

How have you used Smart Layers so far? Have you done any customizations to it? We’d love to see it!

]]>https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/08/02/taking-control-of-whats-next-and-recommended-layers/feed/79Smart Layers & AMBER Alerts Coming Together in Next Week’s Hackathonhttps://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/08/01/smart-layers-amber-alerts-coming-together-in-next-weeks-hackathon/
https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/08/01/smart-layers-amber-alerts-coming-together-in-next-weeks-hackathon/#commentsThu, 01 Aug 2013 15:34:23 +0000http://www.addthis.com/blog/?p=6686During next Thursday’s hackathon, a group of AddThis developers will drop what they’re doing to work on integrating ValueClick’s emergency warning system into AddThis Smart Layers. They’ll focus first on creating AMBER Alerts that will dynamically display on tablets, smartphones, and computers in areas where abductions take place.

ValueClick’s warning system serves geo-targeted emergency messages from various federal agencies to inform users in relevant areas. The hope is that coming out of hackathon, the feature will be an opt-in layer for Smart Layers. This means that when an AMBER Alert is issued, web audiences will be served an emergency message if they visit a participating page at a location and time that match the alert. Frequency caps would be related to the type and severity of the alert.

Rich LaBarca, our VP Product Management, has this to say about the project: “Our massive reach across the web and our skills and expertise in content sharing and distribution make us uniquely positioned to add value to this effort. We’re thrilled to work on this project that may save lives.”

]]>https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/08/01/smart-layers-amber-alerts-coming-together-in-next-weeks-hackathon/feed/0Not Seeing the Buttons You Expected? It’s Because Smart Layers are Personalizedhttps://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/07/30/not-seeing-the-buttons-you-want/
https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/07/30/not-seeing-the-buttons-you-want/#commentsTue, 30 Jul 2013 13:00:05 +0000http://www.addthis.com/blog/?p=6612One of the key features of our new Smart Layers is something you can’t actually see. All the share buttons are personalized to each visitor. This makes it much more likely that people will share your site.

How It Works

AddThis is installed on 14 million domains, and sees over 100 million share events every month by 1.3 billion unique visitors per month. AddThis tools were loading over a trillion times last year! So, we have a huge amount of data about how people share across the web. When a user lands on your page, we know which services they’ve shared to before, even if they’re visiting your page for the first time. In turn, by default, the Share Layer shows visitors the services they’re most familiar with. By showing them the services they know, they’re more likely to engage with your page. We’ve seen an increase in engagement of almost 60% by showing users the services they’re more likely to use.

“But I know what my users want!”

We’re sure you know what your users want, but think about those who have never been to your site. For instance, let’s say one of your pages gets very popular in The Netherlands. The top social network there isn’t Facebook, Twitter, or Google+. It’s called Hyves. If you’re only showing the top U.S. services, these users will have to dig through our sharing menu to find Hyves, which means more of them will give up on the share and go somewhere else. By insisting on using only U.S. social networks you would be missing out on a whole new customer base.

The other problem is having too many buttons. You could include all the sharing services, but finding the service the customer wants to use would be very hard for you. Personalization lets AddThis do the work of figuring out which services to show while effectively having them all available to show users based on their preferences. (By the way, AddThis supports over 300 social networks.) So even if you’ve never heard of it, your users can use it to share your content.

And if you’re wondering if websites need to look exactly the same in every browser, here’s your answer. :)

So when you’re testing your site on multiple browsers, and the Share Layer buttons keep changing, it’s ok. It’s just AddThis working behind the scenes to make sure your visitors are seeing exactly the right services at the right time.

]]>https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/07/30/not-seeing-the-buttons-you-want/feed/29Optimize Your Smart Layers with Open Graphhttps://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/07/25/optimize-smart-layers-with-open-graph/
https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/07/25/optimize-smart-layers-with-open-graph/#commentsThu, 25 Jul 2013 16:00:28 +0000http://www.addthis.com/blog/?p=6580Once you’ve added the Smart Layers code to your page, there are a couple things you should know so you can optimize how the What’s Next and Recommended Content layers display on your site. Smart Layers uses Open Graph meta tags to determine how to display links to your pages, and to specify which content is shared from your page.

Open Graph Tags

For those of you who don’t know, Open Graph is a standard supported by most social networks and services that determines, say, the summarized information, image, and title that shows up when you share a link to Facebook. OG Tags are a type of meta tag that are prefixed with og:, then add a more specific property to be set.

The minimum recommended tags for proper display are og:title (for the title), og:image (for the thumbnail image), and og:url (canonical/permanent url of the page).

You will want to place these tags in the <head> of your web page. If any of these tags are not present, the Smart Layers user experience may be suboptimal, and will degrade to available information; for example, it won’t show the image, and will use the url as the title.

For more information about the protocol and additional Open Graph tags that can be added to your site, check out The Open Graph protocol.

Keep in mind that these updates take a little while to show on the Recommended Content and What’s Next Layers. Give it 24-48 hours for this analysis, but if the site doesn’t get a lot of traffic, it may take a bit longer to gather enough data to determine what to recommend.

These days mobile and tablet rule the web, and we’re realigning our focus to create retina-ready sharing tools at AddThis. There are several trends happening, but we chose to focus on the following principles for Smart Layers: flat design, svgs, and the road to responsive, retina-ready tools.

1. Bevel Be-Gone

The team settled on a flat visual direction for Smart Layers across the board. The decision-making was built on a common goal: simplicity. Flat design, while popular, also happens to best express our visual identity. This direction serves our sharing tools well by providing a clean user experience.

A general rule of thumb is to keep it simple––no one likes to hunt for their content. Minimalism is becoming a popular style in the design community, and I’m beginning to see more white space, app-style interfaces, and design focused on clean typography. And what’s not to love about scalable graphics, adaptive content, and fast loading?

2. Scalable Vector Graphics

Since the UX team is moving away from bevels and gradients, one might ask, What does that mean for our sharing tools? Answer: vectorize & update 300+ service icons. I had an arsenal of designers sitting around me, and one thing’s for sure I couldn’t have done it without them or the beloved espresso machine.

3. Instantly Responsive

Your life just got easier with one set of code. It’s that simple: copy and paste our tools onto your site, and you’ll see the them work cohesively between mobile and tablet. This release was a giant milestone for the team, and I look forward to what the team brews up next.

Enough about our design process. What’s your take on flat design and other principles? How have you found ways to improve performance through these techniques?

]]>https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/07/17/designing-addthis-smart-layers/feed/13Using AddThis Smart Layershttps://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/07/12/using-addthis-smart-layers/
https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/07/12/using-addthis-smart-layers/#commentsFri, 12 Jul 2013 14:20:05 +0000http://www.addthis.com/blog/?p=6436Yesterday AddThis CEO Ramsey McGrory introduced Smart Layers, an easier way to get more traffic and followers with one piece of code. In this post I’ll go into a little more detail about how to get Smart Layers, what to need to do if you already use AddThis tools (hint: nothing!) and some simple ways to customize Smart Layers for your site or blog.

Getting Started

Smart Layers was designed with three objectives in mind: drive more traffic and followers with one piece of code, optimize that experience for mobile tablets and phones from the beginning, and help publishers and bloggers simplify their pages by offering social tools at the right time yet out of the viewer’s way.

Getting Smart Layers is easy – just go to http://addthis.com/smartlayers. The only information you need to provide is URLs for your social media profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and any other sites where fans can follow your brand.

Be sure to include URLs to your social media profiles so fans can follow you!

Pro tip: Don’t forget to sign in if you’re already an AddThis member or create an account – all it takes is an email address – so you can get free analytics reporting on your site’s Smart Layers.

That’s it! Just copy the one piece of code, paste it into the HTML of your pages anywhere between the <BODY> and </BODY> tags, and you’re done. Optimized mobile experiences will instantly appear for visitors on tablets and phones. We’ll be releasing Smart Layers plugins for WordPress and other popular CMS platforms soon.

Already Use AddThis Tools?

If you’re already using AddThis tools and want to install Smart Layers, no problem. Smart Layers works seamlessly with other AddThis tools such as Sharing Buttons or our Welcome Bar.

Pro tip: You can compare how many shares, clicks, and follows your site gets with our in-page tools vs. Smart Layers (or even both). AddThis analytics reports are designed to help you monitor shares, clicks, and follows – even in real time – and understand which content is most effective at driving engagement. Here what’s called an “A/B test”: note how many shares, clicks, and follows your site got last week (“A”); now install Smart Layers and watch what happens for the following week (“B”). We’re confident you’ll see a big difference!

Use AddThis analytics reports to measure traffic, followers and engagement

Customizing Smart Layers

There are several simple ways you can configure Smart Layers when you grab the code, such as turning layers on and off, placing the Share Layer on the right or left, and choosing from several color themes.

You can also use our Smart Layers API to select specific sharing services (though you’ll get better performance by allowing the Share Layer to auto-personalize), assign themes to individual layers, move the mobile Share and Follow buttons, and control which links show up as recommendations.

Send Us Feedback

Let us know what you think about Smart Layers, and how this new tool has performed on your site or blog. Send us some feedback – we’d love to hear from you.

]]>https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/07/12/using-addthis-smart-layers/feed/78AddThis Smart Layers: Personalizing the Webhttps://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/07/11/addthis-smart-layers/
https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/07/11/addthis-smart-layers/#commentsThu, 11 Jul 2013 13:00:18 +0000http://www.addthis.com/blog/?p=6415Today, we’re democratizing awesomeness with the next generation of web tools. AddThis Smart Layers includes Share, Follow, Recommended Content and What’s Next tools all in one line of code. We’re bringing data and responsive technology together for publishers of all sizes in ways that have generally only been available to resource-heavy companies like Yahoo! or Amazon.

Smart Layers is designed to drive measurable outcomes––increasing engagement, traffic and monetization––for sites across all devices and platforms. Smart Layers is responsively designed, optimized and retina-ready for mobile, tablet, and desktop. One line of code and, Boom! It just works.

Smart Layers @ Work: Mobile & Personalized

Smart Layers puts the right social tools and content in the right place for every visitor. By personalizing the experience for each, visitors will spend more time on site, share more to their friends and buy more (for ecommerce sites). Check out this video to learn more.

Or, just look at our blog right here where you are now. If you visit this post on a mobile or tablet device, you’ll see how it changes. If you’re on desktop, see the sharing tool on the left? It’s personalized for you. Look up and to the right. You can easily become a fan or follower with the Follow Layer. Now, if you keep scrolling towards the bottom of this post, you’ll see personalized prompts appear through the What’s Next Layer and other AddThis content promoted in the Recommended Content Layers. This is all done with one line of code based on our expertise in content marketing and distribution.

Content Marketing and Distribution

AddThis is one of the most widely adopted technologies on the Internet today. We are leveraged by over 14 million unique websites on a monthly basis, and our technology was called over 1 trillion times in 2012. Many think of AddThis as a sharing company and we’ll continue to provide awesome sharing tools, but sharing is really a form of consumer to consumer content distribution and engagement. That’s our real mission—delivering engagement tools and services across advertising, publishing and e-commerce. Engagement happens on social sites like Twitter and Facebook, but it also happens on millions and millions of other small and large sites everyday.

Smart Layers is a natural next step in our evolution to personalize the web with powerful, easy-to-use engagement tools, empowering all sites to create rich content experiences.

We’re not done yet either. There’s so much more to do on personalization in the age of privacy. Regardless of the outcome of discussions about cookies and user privacy, we know that publishers, advertisers AND consumers all want relevant and rich content experiences on any device. With Smart Layers, we are delivering the tools to make that happen.

We believe in the power of the open web. Today is a milestone for us and we thank you for your continued feedback and ideas that inform all of our products and iterations. Now it’s your turn. Take Smart Layers for a test drive with our live demo. Make your site smarter with AddThis Smart Layers.

#getsmarts #addthisawesomeness

July 30: Update made to clarify content.

]]>https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/07/11/addthis-smart-layers/feed/49I’m Matt, Your New Support Engineer!https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/06/27/im-matt-your-new-support-engineer/
https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/06/27/im-matt-your-new-support-engineer/#commentsThu, 27 Jun 2013 16:30:55 +0000http://www.addthis.com/blog/?p=6342Hi, I’m Matt Hinegardner, and I just joined the Publisher Support team. I’ll be assisting Paul and Ifdy to help you to implement all the great social plugins and analytic tools that AddThis has to offer!

Prior to joining the team at AddThis, I worked mostly in the EdTech industry for a number of years, providing support to both consumer and institutional customers, as well as chasing software pirates. I have also worked on many small business web development projects, mostly using Content Management Systems, especially WordPress.

At AddThis, I’ll be assisting our publishers with implementing and getting the most out of our social plugins and analytics. This includes troubleshooting various HTML, CSS, and JavaScript issues on publisher websites and assisting developers with our APIs.

I thoroughly enjoy the mixture between being on the front lines of customer interaction and utilizing my web development knowledge to ensure our publishers are able to use our tools effectively.

I’m really looking forward to getting to know our community (i.e. you)! If there are any other changes you’d like to see made to our support center, drop me a line in the comments below!

]]>https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/04/11/latest-addthis-update-joomla/feed/10Follow Button Social Profileshttps://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/02/27/follow-button-profiles/
https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/02/27/follow-button-profiles/#commentsWed, 27 Feb 2013 17:52:35 +0000http://www.addthis.com/blog/?p=5672Today, we are happy to offer the new Find Profiles feature to help you with creating AddThis Follow buttons.

The Find Profiles feature helps you find all of your Twitter and Facebook profiles (usernames and pages), and then allows you to select which profile(s) to use for your follow buttons.

This feature currently works with both Facebook and Twitter, and will be integrated with more social networks in future releases.

It is important to note that you do not need to create an AddThis account to use the Find Profiles feature. But, if you do already have an AddThis account (and have linked your Facebook and/or Twitter accounts), then sign into your AddThis account for your follow buttons to automatically use your social profiles.

]]>https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/02/27/follow-button-profiles/feed/8Learning about cognitive science at the NoVA UX meetuphttps://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/02/14/learning-about-cognitive-science-at-the-nova-ux-meetup/
https://www.addthis.com/blog/2013/02/14/learning-about-cognitive-science-at-the-nova-ux-meetup/#commentsThu, 14 Feb 2013 18:10:33 +0000http://www.addthis.com/blog/?p=5641For our February NoVA UX meetup, John Whalen (PhD Cognitive Science Johns Hopkins and Founder, Brilliant Experience consultancy) shared his insights and experience about cognitive science with the group. Using videos and interactive examples, he shared learnings about how we perceive, remember, and make decisions, and how those concepts can be applied to user experience design.

He began by talking about memory, perception, and the systems of our brain that control them. Since our attention is easily distracted and much of what we think we see is actually constructed by our brains, as designers we can use techniques such as visual cues and story-telling to guide viewers through interfaces more effectively.

Next, John walked through how we make decisions based on what we perceive and remember – and how easily those memories can be lost. He gave an example of a checkout process that offered a discount code at the beginning, which was forgotten and inaccessible by the end when payment was expected – not a good experience indeed. He then walked through strategies that designers can use to enhance interfaces that help the viewer make decisions such as registrations or purchases, such as:

asking for smaller commitments to build up to bigger ones

providing social proof – others who bought this bought that too

giving perceived control to the viewer – “build” your dream car

For more details, check out John’s slides and join us for upcoming meetups about designing for behavioral change, e-commerce, and usability testing.

These new surfaces demonstrate the popularity of your content on the top social networks. We retrieve share counts directly from each service’s API; data is cached and loaded asynchronously for optimal page load performance.

We’ll be integrating additional service counts in future releases (and we’d love to know which services you think we should add next).

Toolbox Support and Icon Sizes
Both horizontal and vertical toolboxes are supported, with 16×16, 20×20, and 32×32 pixel icons.

Horizontal Toolbox Examples:

If you already use AddThis, you can start using the individual share counters horizontal toolbox with this HTML snippet:

You can get these counters without registering, but if you’re not already an AddThis user and you’d like to receive analytics about how your content is being shared, you’ll need to create an account. It just takes a minute to set up!